“Yes,” said the doctor. “If you would — towels, hot water. Lots of both.”
“Of course,” said Cargill. Taking one of the lamps, he left the room.
The woman on the bed was undoubtedly in labor. She groaned again, and murmured, but Doctor Lamming couldn’t make out what she had said. He stripped the blanket away, and saw that Cargill had been right. Soon now. He took his tools from the bag, wrapped in a towel, spread them out on a table, his own stainless steel equipment, the two silver scalpels that had been his father’s, that he now carried more as good luck charms than anything else, memories of his father, who had been the Doctor Lamming in the town before him, and in whose footsteps he had striven to walk.
The woman was in pain. He worked rapidly, not noticing the odd, the strange, the unbelievable, not noticing anything but the work he was doing. The baby didn’t seem to want to be born. It was difficult, it was long and exhausting, but finally he held the infant in his hands. The child breathed, it weakly moved its chubby fists, but it did not cry out.
He set the child down and stared. He had been working with such absorption, had been so blind to everything aside from his own movements and the movements of the child, that now he could do nothing but stare, with shock and disbelief.
It had been a bloodless birth. A birth completely without blood. And now, as he stared with horror at the woman’s face, her eyes closed and her mouth open as she lay in exhausted sleep, he knew what this woman was. He looked at the sharp, pointed teeth, the long, fang-like canines, the pale lips, the chalk-white face, and he knew just what she was.
And what he had to do. The furniture in the room was old, some of it was beaten and rickety. He grabbed a chair, wrenched at it, managed to pull one of the slats out of the back. He reached for a knife, one of the delicate instruments of his profession, he hacked at the slat of wood until one end of it was sharp and pointed. Turning, he closed his eyes and plunged the wooden stake into the sleeping woman’s heart.
She moved, with a sudden lurching spasm, her cold arms beating against his face, and from her throat came the scream of the banshee, the scream of the doomed in Hell. He fell away from her, lost his balance, toppled to the floor. Rising, he saw that she was still, and that she was incredibly old.
He had to get away. He turned to the door, and Cargill was standing there, in one hand the kerosene lamp, in the other a handful of folded towels.
They stared at each other, and Cargill’s eyes seemed to be alight with passion, with rage, with obscene lust.
Doctor Lamming backed away, bumping into the table on which lay his bag and his tools. He stared at the other with loathing and fear. “Vampire!” he screamed, and his voice echoed through the empty rooms of the house.
Cargill set down the lamp, dropped the towels on the floor. “Yes,” he said. “A new world. Our new world, too. You’ll never know how difficult it was to make the crossing. To a new world, where we are not hunted, where we are not known, where we are safe.”
“You are known,” the doctor told him. “You are not safe.”
“Known only as legend.” Cargill looked without emotion at the bed. “You have killed my wife,” he said. “But I will have a new wife. And first I will have a new brother.”
The doctor backed away again, around the table, clutching at the bag on the table, wondering if he could hurl the bag, duck, run around the man — the vampire — the thing before him, down the stairs, to safety.
“The gates are closed,” Cargill told him. “You are mine,” And his arms moved up, above his head. But, no, his arms were stretched out, toward the doctor, and he rose, to the beat of dusty black wings, to swoop down upon the doctor.
The doctor screamed and pawed at the table. His father’s scalpels! His hand touched one of them, and he brought it up, a glinting silver blade, and as the hungry mouth lunged down at him he pushed the blade deep into the other’s neck.
Cargill slumped before him, clutching the doctor’s coat, gasping oaths in a language the doctor had never before heard, and the doctor swung once more with the silver scalpel, driving it deep into Cargill’s chest. Cargill screamed, and the monstrous wings fluttered, and the vampire lay dead.
Doctor Lamming staggered from the room. He had to get away, he had to get help, he had to call the police, there might be more of them here, more of them. In the darkness, without the lamp to guide him, he stumbled and ran along the upper hall, clattered and lurched and half-fell down the broad staircase, ran panting to the front door and to his car.
The car started at the first try. He turned it around, backing, turning, then pressed the accelerator to the floor and the car leaped ahead, to race around the curving driveway to the road.
The gates were closed, as Cargill had said. He hit the brakes, shoving downward with his foot, and the car squealed and swerved to a stop inches from the gates. He got out of the car, ran to the gates, pushed on them, and they started to open.
Something brushed his face. He turned and looked up, and it hovered just above him, its tiny dusky wings beating silently, and then it plunged and Doctor Lamming screamed his life away.
The baby.
1960
An Empty Threat
Ah, the South Seas. Maugham heroes and the young native girls, buxom and burgeoning at eighteen, so warm, so soft, so simple and oh, so willing. Ah, the South Seas and simple youth and the soothing, sun-tanned sirens of Samoa. Ah, for romance with the charming native girls, who never never never, it seems, give birth.
And ah, the daydreams in the cold, cold winter air. With all the car windows closed, Frederick Leary shriveled in the dry warm air spewed from the heater beside his knees, and the windshield misted over. With a window open, the cold air outside reached thin freezing fingers in to icily tweak his thin nose, and the vulnerable virgins of the South Pacific receded, waving, undulating, growing small and indistinct and far, far out of reach.
And Frederick Leary was only Frederick Leary after all. Manager of the local branch of the Bonham Bookstore chain. Well-read, through accretion. A husband, but not a father. Thirty-two, but not wealthy. College-trained, and distantly liked by his employees.
Irritated, annoyed, obscurely cheated, Frederick Leary turned into his driveway, and the car that had been following him pulled to the curb three houses away. Frederick pushed open the car door, which squeaked and cracked, and plodded through the snow to push up the garage door, an overhead, put in at great expense and a damned nuisance for all the cost. And the car that had been following him disgorged its occupant, a pale and indecisive youth, who shrunk inside his overcoat, who stood hatless in the gentle fall of snow, who chewed viciously upon a filter-tip cigarette and fondled the gun in his pocket, wondering if he had the nerve.
Returning to his car, Frederick drove it into the garage. Armed with a brown paper sack containing bread and milk, he left car and garage, pulled down the damned overhead behind him, and slogged through the new-fallen snow toward the back porch. And the youth threw away the soggy butt and shuffled away, to walk around the block, kicking at the drifts of snow, building up his courage for the act.
The back porch was screened, and the slamming of the screen door made an odd contrast to the snow collapsing from the sky. Frederick maneuvered the brown paper bag from hand to hand as he removed his overshoes, then pushed open the back door and walked into a blast of heat and bright yellow. The kitchen.